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I’ve been reading a lot of accounts recently that argue indigenous people asserted much more control over many areas of the continent into the 19th century than modern people usually assume (check out The Native Ground by Kathleen DuVal or An Infinity of Nations by Michael Witgen, not to mention Hamalainen’s Comanche Empire) and I got to thinking about the response my post about the teaching of Native history received.

One of the most common responses was along the lines of “Well, Native Americans didn’t contribute much to history anyway, they didn’t do much important, it’s sad but they were basically just wiped away by Europeans.” There is an incredible amount of hindsight bias in that kind of thinking. When you are living in a society in a time where Native people have been very carefully thrust out of view, it is easy to see the dominance of European-descendants as an inevitable, steadily progressing event. Manifest Destiny was always propaganda, and it has done its job beautifully.

Meanwhile, more and more historians and indigenous people at large are making powerful, nuanced demonstrations of how that view is not just a product of hindsight bias but also flatly incorrect for many parts of the continent. Others have shown how the “forgetting” of the impacts of indigenous people is part of a very deliberate political strategy in the creation of the US nation-state.

Yet still both laypeople and academics are skeptical that indigenous people had any impact on the history of the Americas besides in their legacy of disappearing. Why?

I’m starting to think it has to do with what I’m calling “two-sentence history.” Or maybe “textbook history” might work, too. A great deal of people do not seem to believe history matters unless you can explain it to them in about two sentences. Or that history outside of what would be taught in a grade-school textbook is not worth bothering with. A number of people in my earlier post pointed out that even European history is pretty shoddily written in textbooks–which is true, though it still gets a better deal than non-European history. Textbooks have historically been written with particular goals of providing an easy-to-follow and patriotic nation-supporting narrative. It’s not necessarily bad that textbooks are a specialized kind of writing–every kind of writing has some specific purpose. But too many people seem to have the attitude that any history more in-depth than that is pointless.

Note that the holder of the Two-Sentence View doesn’t just want you to be able to explain what happened in two sentences. No, you also have to be able to explain how and why what happened is of tangible relevance to Two-Sentence Viewholder right now. And then add in that what is considered “relevant” is largely determined by the narrative the viewholder was fed whenever they attended school. It’s basically a self-perpetuating cycle, with only the two sentences in their grade-school textbook ever being accepted as valid. Any new views of history are basically impossible to introduce with that sort of mindset.

This is all part of a bigger issue: why study history at all? The importance of history itself, any history, is increasingly challenged in the United States. “Why history” is an enormous question that people more thoughtful than me have answered, and I’m not going to try to do so. But if even mainstream history is being questioned, then the history of those seen as unimportant–such as indigenous people–doesn’t even have a chance.

Pre-Columbian American history is one of my biggest areas of interest. And one of the things I’ve learned over the course of studying it is that unlike in European history, where “theory unsupported by most mainstream historians” generally means “crazy pile of nonsense someone dreamt up to further their political cause,” in Pre-Columbian American history it generally means “explanation of ambiguous evidence that may very well come to be accepted as true in another ten years.”

Non-Native historians of the Pre-Columbian Americas are very reluctant to let go of their preconceived ideas of American history. But after looking through evidence, I think there’s strong suggestions that the following things really happened:

1. Norse in Greenland and the Canadian Atlantic, ~900s to 1400s
This one has been actually definitely proven with lots of records and archeology and stuff. They sailed in from Iceland, set up some camps, got in a lot of fights with the Native people (either Inuit or Tuniit/Thule).

My thought: yeah we know this one happened for sure.

2. Polynesian-South American trade, probably between ~300-1000 AD
This was the period when Polynesian people were sailing all over the place through the Pacific. It’s also the time when sweet potatoes, native to South America, showed up in the Pacific Islands. There’s some material evidence of Polynesian bones and art in Chile. This one is also fairly widely supported by archaeologists although there are some people who disagree.

My thought: 95% sure it happened.

3. Inuit sailors in Europe
This one baffles me because there’s extensive evidence of it but no one actually talks about it. I guess it’s because Native Americans discovering Europe is less exciting than the other way around. Anyway, there were for sure records of Inuit people going to Europe with Norse, mostly as prisoners. There’s also a good amount of evidence in both material and historical records of Inuit-style artifacts and people getting shipwrecked in Iceland, the British Isles, and Friesland.

My thought: This one 100% definitely happened.

4. Japanese sailors in the Pacific Northwest, ??-1800s
There’s a LOT of Japanese shipwrecks in the PNW. There were about 187 shipwrecks of Japanese boats on the PNW coast from 500-1750. Later records from the 1800s write that of the shipwrecks at that time about half had survivors. Records of Japanese sailors sailing into the Pacific the distance it would take to get to the PNW exist and actually it would have been easier to get there than to some of the other places they were going. There are a good amount of Japanese artifacts from Pre-Columbian times in the PNW, though some contest the significance because they might have been old items brought by more recent Japanese sailors.

My thought: I think it almost definitely happened but probably not as a major, regular thing. It’s not as certain as the first three but the evidence is pretty solid.

5. Basque fisherman on the northeast coast, 1300s-1400s
There’s a lot up in the air on this one, with some people taking it as a given that it happened and others saying there’s no evidence whatsoever. The evidence is compelling but all very circumstantial: the Basque established themselves ridiculously early in the region of the North American northeast (the first record is 1517 but they already appeared well-established with the Native people), a Basque-Algonquian pidgin showed up almost immediately, and adult light-skinned, curly-haired, green-eyed Natives were around the area very early on. In addition, European records show that the Basque had found a mysterious source of cod on an island west of Iceland. They were highly secretive of this source but even when they were cut off from Icelandic fishing they continued to bring in fish from the west.

My thought: the evidence isn’t solid enough to say it definitely happened but I would be very very unsurprised if this gets proven to be true in the next decade.